Sometimes your iPhone or iPad shade is usually too small. Fortunately, it’s easy adequate to bond your iOS device to any new TV for a bigger-screen media experience. Here’s a guide, from a simplest to a many formidable solutions.

Connect With a Cable

By far, a simplest proceed to bond your iPhone or iPad to your TV is to use a handle like Apple’s Digital AV Adapter, that connects your Apple device to your TV’s HDMI port. You’ll also need a customary HDMI cable—any one will do, so usually buy a slightest costly one we can find.

There are dual models of a Digital AV Adapter for iOS devices, so make certain we name a right version. Both are $49, yet offer really opposite purposes. The Lightning Digital AV Adapter (pictured) connects your iPhone, iPad, or iPod to an HDMI-equipped TV, display, or projector. The Lightning to VGA Adapter does a same, yet it plugs into VGA-compatible peripherals instead.

Connect your iPhone or iPad and TV with a cable, and switch a TV’s submit to a pier with a cable. Also block a USB finish of your Lightning handle into a adapter and block a other finish into a energy outlet—it needs extract to play. Your TV will turn a transcribe of a connected device’s shade in 1080p HD. Now we can play your iTunes videos, Netflix movies, or whatever else we wish on your TV

There are many third-party Lightning-to-HDMI cables on sale on Amazon for $15 to $25; hunt “lightning to HDMI” for a sampling. They come from companies you’ve never listened of with names like Mostop, Innens, Tessin, and RayCue, to name a few; this Lightning-to-HDMI cable is underneath $20.

One large premonition with those third-party cables, though: if you’re looking to watch video-streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, HBO, or on-demand video from providers like Comcast Xfinity and DirecTV, many of these cables won’t work. They miss High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP), that prevents pirates from capturing high-def digital calm for their possess use. HBO Now has a good primer on how it supports HDCP.

Connect With Apple AirPlay

Maybe we don’t wish a annoying handle between your iPhone and your TV. The easiest proceed to bond wirelessly is with Apple’s AirPlay feature, that allows we to counterpart your iPhone or iPad around a Apple TV or TVs that support AirPlay 2.

If we have an Apple TV set up, make certain it’s connected to a same home Wi-Fi network as your iPhone or iPad. Swipe adult from a bottom of your iPhone or iPad’s shade to launch Control Center, daub AirPlay Mirroring, afterwards name your Apple TV. Your Apple TV will tide a counterpart of whatever is on your device’s screen. (You can also usually use AirPlay to tide media from a iPhone to a TV, such as song or videos you’ve purchased on iTunes.)

Last month, Apple finally non-stop adult a streaming height and announced that some intelligent TVs will support AirPlay 2 streaming. Among a vendors set to support it are LG (2019 models), Samsung (2018 and 2019 models), Sony (2019 models), and Vizio (2017, 2018, and 2019 models). While you’re not expected to run out and buy a new radio usually to expel a few YouTube videos, it is substantially something to keep in mind when you’re selling for your subsequent large screen.

One warning per this method: In really swarming Wi-Fi environments, AirPlay video competence mangle adult or stutter. In that case, use a cable. But it should be excellent for many homes.

Connect With an Android TV Stick or Chromecast

There are some-more arcane, hackerish ways to bond your iPhone or iPad to your TV. For instance, we can get an Android-powered TV stick, block it into a behind of your TV, implement a Kodi media server app (once famous as XBMC), and a hang will be means to play defenceless song and video from a built-in apps on your device by regulating a AirPlay button. It won’t support shade mirroring or stable video streaming.

In my experience, though, this proceed is typically a nightmare. The sticks are slow, buggy, and unreliable, and Kodi support tends to break. Here’s a spirit about what a pain they are: one review includes a phrase, “Once we downloaded an updated chronicle of a device’s central firmware from geekbuying.com and flashed a MK808B.”

While this is really a proceed to save income over an Apple TV (and a hang can run any Android app on your TV, that is cool), what’s your time worth? Probably some-more than a $50 difference.

A improved gamble is a Google Chromecast or Chromecast Ultra. Each is a simple, inexpensive dongle that simply plugs into a TV’s HDMI port—the Ultra supports 4K and Ethernet connections. Your iPhone shade can’t be mirrored on a TV shade over a Chromecast, yet for video streaming, there is a choice to use your iPhone to navigate a streaming media apps that Chromecast supports. Your iPhone becomes a remote control for Netflix, Hulu, YouTube and others (but not Apple, or Amazon—Chromecast doesn’t have them).

To be honest, we can do this within many apps on iPhone to roughly any DLNA device that has a same apps installed—I do it with my Samsung SmartTV and Xbox One all a time. Just demeanour for a Cast idol (above) in any app to get started.

Connect With a DLNA App

If we have an internet-enabled TV, it substantially supports DLNA, a general form of media streaming accessible on many opposite manufacturers’ products. With a right app, we can tide defenceless song and video file—in other words, files we have stored in iTunes and copied to your iPhone; it won’t work with song and videos purchased from a iTunes Store due to Digital Rights Management (DRM) limitations.

However, you’re not singular to streaming media usually from a iPhone—the right app will demeanour during media stored on other devices, like your PC, and act as a match to set adult streaming from PC to TV, for example. Devices we can tide to embody not usually TVs yet also diversion consoles and PCs. You don’t have to modify any videos or implement special codecs to make it work.

If your TV doesn’t uncover adult on a app, we might need to activate a DLNA function. Go to a TV’s internet tie menu and demeanour for an choice to tide from a PC or home server. That’s DLNA.

Sunshine is another option—install a chronicle of a app on all inclination so we can simply share non-DRM media between them; it will also assistance we expel media to a TV (but doesn’t do mirroring, so there is no examination streaming video apps.